When Terrence Malick showed his last film, To the Wonder, at the Venice film festival two years ago it seemed to me a bold and heartfelt movie about the possibilities of rapture in everyday lives. It was indulgent, certainly, but visually striking, ambitious, a thoroughly worthwhile companion-piece to his great award-winner The Tree of Life - and moreover able to withstand noisy denigration from pundits who seemed to receive all sorts of identikit movies elsewhere in respectful quiet.

With his latest film Knight of Cups, however, Malick has frankly declined. There are moments of visual brilliance here, moments of reverence and even grandeur. He is always distinctive, and anything he does must be of interest. But his style is stagnating into mannerism, cliche and self-parody. Where once he used his transcendant visual language to evoke heartland America, these tropes are now exposed in being applied to tiresome tinseltown LA, where a screenwriter played by Christian Bale undergoes what has to be the least interesting spiritual crisis in history.

Pedantically introduced by the voice of John Gielgud reading from The Pilgrim’s Progress, this is a very familiar montage-melange of images and ideas: the sunsets, the whispery voiceovers, the bewitching (but in narrative terms entirely disposable) young women in floaty dresses dancing puckishly ahead of the man, occasionally turning round to dance backwards. We get people striding fully dressed into the surf, laughing, to indicate their life-affirming sensual freedom, and people who seem never to have seen a swimming pool before in their lives, so transfixed and saucer-eyed do they become, trailing their fingers in the shimmering blue water.

Bale plays Rick, in the midst of a career-breakthrough into being super-hot and super-rich. But he has lost it after the collapse of his marriage to Nancy (Cate Blanchett) – a brainy hospital doctor nobly treating unfamous, unpretty people. He is also tormented by agonised relationships with dad (Brian Dennehy) and brother (Wes Bentley). For a writer, he seems to do no actual writing. His apartment seems to have no laptops or computers or indeed books: just some quaintly scribbled-upon pads. These we notice when he is robbed in his home by two desperate criminals, although this catastrophic event unfolds at the same woozy, dreamy, flashback pace as the rest of the movie and is thus hardly noticed.

Rick’s time is taken up with dallying moodily and smoulderingly with beautiful semi-clothed young women as they prance around him in blank apartments and trashed hotel suites, or simper at him at celebrity parties. Rick will also brood, all alone, in deserts or various remote ruin-porn locations. Wait – where did he leave the car?

Now, there is no rule that says LA and the film business have to be described in terms of black comedy and lenient chuckling satire, no rule that says that the people in this world, however shallow or meretricious, cannot be taken seriously and inspected seriously. Bernard Rose did precisely this with his Ivansxtc, a version of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych which made the hero a Hollywood agent.

But what seems clear from Knight of Cups (the title is taken from a Tarot card – Rick goes to a Tarot reader as part of his inner journey) is that the hero is, by any yardstick, fantastically self-pitying and self-important. And yet we are never invited to see him as anything other than a compelling figure, who mediates our response to the wonderful or scary things that Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera sees. The movie elides Rick with the power of the landscape, whether splendid or squalid, and with the film’s visual impact, which is hardly negligible. That identification is dubious, and the mythological and spiritual resonance of everything that we see is entirely unearned.

There are some felicitous touches. Antonio Banderas has an engaging cameo as the host of a sumptuous party, in which guests mill about, each hardly able to believe the extravagance. And there is a great surreal moment in which a dog, wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt plunges into the pool in search of a ball: from underwater, we see its great almost disembodied jaws snapping. Los Angeles itself is depicted with connoisseurship and flair, as are the great corporate cliffs of glass and metal, the symbols of earthly power which suddenly look null. But for every pinch of poetry, there are kilos of joyless, uninspired prose.